In 1896 the government of Abdülhamid II (1876-1909) encouraged Armenians who were bound to the United States to emigrate under the condition that they renounce their Ottoman subjecthood (terk-i tabiiyet), and vow never to return. The government wanted to restrict the circular mobility of Armenians and turned what began as a form of temporary sojourn for males in the late 1880s – many of whom were motivated to return after they accumulated money to look after their property or take care of their families – into a permanent form. To exit the empire, Armenians had to submit two identity photographs. These visuals were duplicated into twelve and distributed to the Internal and Foreign Affairs, Police Ministries, and Ottoman ports of entry to register the undesirable subjects. In addition to the photographs, a lot of things were on the move at the turn of the twentieth century: Migrants, endless correspondences on nationality and denaturalization - but also fear, suspicion, threat, and what the Hamidian government saw as fesad (sedition). Via closely policing their mobility, withholding their basic rights as subjects, and labeling them/their mobility as treacherous, disloyal, and suspicious, the late Ottoman Empire discriminated against its Armenian population. The government did not even trust ordinary Armenians who declared that they would be in America for a short time for purposes such as trade, visit, education, and marriage, and it aimed to shape the Armenian transatlantic movement completely. Armenian transatlantic migration was seen as a form of fesad by the government, which linked the cautionary bureaucratic measures on Armenians’ return with the belief that Armenians would bring their “seditious ideas,” from the US if they return. In this paper, I focus on the flow of people, visual and written materials, and suspicion between the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire, ports, Istanbul, and North America. Which language did the Hamidian bureaucratic apparatus use to label Armenian mobility? According to the government, where did the fesad originate from/travel to/have to be banned from at the beginning of the twentieth century? How did the government act with suspicion and threat, and what techniques did it employ to make Armenians legible? Since the concept of fesad is entrenched in Ottoman Turkish and denigrated diverse communities as revolutionaries, bandits, and migrants in the Ottoman Empire, I seek to understand what kind of uncontainable radicalism Armenian transatlantic mobility involved.